The NOAA National Climatic Data Center: Data Availability,
WDC-A, and GCOS Data Sets
Karsten A. Shein1 and Howard J. Diamond1
1 NOAA
National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina, USA.
Correspondence author e-mail: Karsten.Shein@noaa.gov
Abstract
This paper presents an overview of climatic data offered by the NOAA National Climatic
Data Center and the World Data Center for Meteorology – Asheville. Specific emphasis
is placed on data that has coverage of or relevance to the NEESPI research region.
Datasets include surface and upper air data, and are constructed by incorporating data
that has been exchanged between the United States and the Russian Federation during
a data exchange agreement that has been in place since the 1970s.
Introduction
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data
Center (NCDC) is among the world’s largest repositories of climate and environmental
data. Located in Asheville, North Carolina, NCDC is one of the UNESCO World Data
Centers. In addition, NCDC is the home of the World Data Center for Meteorology –
Asheville (WDC-A), which is one of three WDCs for Meteorology – the others being at
the All Russian Institute for Hydrometeorological Information (RIHMI) in Obninsk, Russia
and at the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) in Beijing, China.
NCDC and the World Data Centers (especially WDC-A and RIHMI-WDC) provide
access to a wealth of climate data and information for the Arctic as a whole and, more
specifically, for the research regions of the Northern Eurasia Earth Sciences Partnership
Initiative (NEESPI). Both in situ and remotely sensed climatic data are archived and
data coverage includes a number of variables from the surface and subsurface as well
as the atmospheric column well into the lower stratosphere.
A number of these data sets are the result of efforts between the United States and the
Russian Federation (formerly USSR) to exchange environmental data that was deemed
important to understanding the Earth’s environmental systems. These exchanged data
have been incorporated into several comprehensive global surface and upper air data
sets covering such variables as snow cover, soil temperature, precipitation, and air
temperature.
All of the data archived at NCDC is available for access, and many of the data sets
relevant to NEESPI research are available via the Internet, either from NCDC directly
(http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/) or through the World Data Centers (http://wdcameteorology.org). Most of these data sets are also incorporated in the Global Climate
Observing System (GCOS), which can be accessed via the Global Observing Systems
Information Center (GOSIC) Web portal.
Data Exchange and Products
On of the primary sources for the environmental data and information for northern
Eurasia that is provided by NCDC and the WDC is the aforementioned data exchange
activity between NOAA and Roshydromet (Russia). This exchange was begun in the
1970s as a means to gain a more complete global understanding of the environment.
Since that time, the exchange activities have included not only the transfer of valuable
environmental data, but have fostered a number of collaborative international research
projects, especially in the Arctic. Research activities and data exchanges have taken
place at many institutions in both Russia and the United States, including several
universities (e.g., St. Petersburg State University, University of Alaska, and University of
Maryland) in addition to a number of governmental institutions in both countries (e.g.,
Russian Academy of Science, Main Geophysical Observatory, University Consortium for
Atmospheric Research).
Exchanges of data for the Arctic and northern Eurasia have included oceanographic
data collected by US and Russian research vessels (e.g., water temperature, ice
thickness, salinity), terrestrial data such as soil temperatures, state of the ground (i.e.,
frozen, unfrozen), and snow cover extent, and atmospheric data that include
meteorological measurements for several thousand surface stations (many in the
NEESPI region) and hundreds of upper-air radiosonde balloons, and extensive satellite
coverage.
Surface (land and sea) atmospheric measurements that are available for locations within
the NEESPI research domain include air temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, wind
speed and direction, air pressure, and trace gasses such as Carbon Dioxide and Ozone.
Most of these data are available at either daily or monthly time scales, while a few (e.g.,
air temperature) are available at synoptic (hourly or 3-hourly) scales, and most of these
data sets receive regular and timely updates via the Global Telecommunications System
(GTS) or via FTP from their respective originating organizations. In this way, data users
are ensured of having the most up-to-date data through the present. Although the
exchanges have been ongoing, new datasets continue to become available. For
example, as part of a data rescue effort by Roshydromet, a data set of monthly mean air
temperatures from the Russian Empire between 1743 and 1928 is now available as
NCDC Dataset DSI-9809.
Data Access
In the United States, all exchanged atmospheric data is archived at NCDC and the
WDC-A, with the exception of some trace gas data that is housed at the Carbon Dioxide
Information and Analysis Center (CDIAC) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee
(http://cdiac.ornl.gov).
In Russia, these data are available from RIHMI-WDC
(http://meteo.ru/english/). These data are primarily available as part of larger, globalcoverage datasets such as the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) for daily and
monthly surface data, and the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) for daily
upper air data.
In addition, there are numerous data sets that are available from the WDC through at
least 28 major international research projects (e.g., International Polar Year) and
programs (e.g., Global Climate Observing System). These and other data are nearly all
on-line and can usually be accessed via NCDC’s Web interface (see Figure 1) or
through the World Data Centers. In addition, and for data that is not available via the
Internet, fax, telephone and postal mail orders also are accepted and processed.
To better identify and link to data that may not be held at NCDC, Web portals, such as
GOSIC (http://www.gosic.org/ - see Figure 2) or the Global Change Master Directory
(GCMD – http://gcmd.nasa.gov) may be helpful. These portals provide access to a
searchable metadata directory that directs the seeker to relevant data sets and provides
information regarding data access and restrictions.
While current Web-based methods provide the most expedient access to these data,
there are ways in which access can be improved. Currently, NCDC offers some spatial
and temporal search capabilities via its Web map server and Climate Data Online
(CDO). However, the ability to efficiently subset data products has been a shortcoming
in the current system (most data reside in flat files that must be completely downloaded
and then parsed by the user). Search interfaces that can be tied to relational databases
present some promise in giving the data requestor the ability to request specific subsets
of data. Such technology may also more easily facilitate the searching of multiple data
sets with disparate data (and from diverse sources), and the retrieval of an integrated
data product tailored to the individual user’s requirements (i.e., variables, formats, spatial
and temporal extent). At the present time, NCDC and the WDC are evaluating methods
that might make such search and retrieval a possibility.
Figure Legends
Figure 1. Home page of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.
Figure 2. Home page of the Global Observing Systems Information Center (GOSIC).
Figure 1. Home page of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center
Figure 2. Home page of the Global Observing Systems Information Center (GOSIC)